What I've been doing this week

While I have been prepping some more figures for the next Talomir Tales battle I spent most of the last few days making the play bill for my son's class play.

I got the idea to use the Gerome painting after reading Red Sand Blue Sky: Heroes of the Arena (by Two Hour Wargames now out of print). I did not realize this piece was at the Phoenix Art Museum, sounds like a trip over the summer. I added the mosaic border from a cropped image, also from wikimedia commons.

I tried a few different fonts before landing on Times New Roman. It had the look I wanted, but was just too dull in plain white. I remembered seeing something about making a gold text effect. I found this one and worked pretty well except for one thing. When I did it the whole image would be gold instead of gold text on a clear background. By re-introducing the bump map layer (the white text on black background) as a layer mask of the gold text image you can achieve that.

For the cast list I was channeling the intro to I Claudius. The font is called Classical Mosaic, or Classic Mosaic. The overall background is the Mosaic filter in GIMP and then another cropped mosaic image from wikimedia. Sorry about the heavy handed blur tool, but I didn't want to show the children's names.

I don't posses any real artistic talent or design education, but I like how it turned out. I think if I were to do it over I'd make the gold text all one layer and do the effect on it all at once, instead of the four different blocks I did here.

Hopefully we can finish the game of Knight's Quest we started tonight, and I can get he figures for the Talomir battle primed up. Mother's Day may put some of these plans on hold.